Posts Tagged 'Startups'

During the NewCo Boulder festival, web development agency Quick Left gave a talk about diversity and inclusion in the workplace. The panelists shared stories of their experiences around diversity—good and bad—and gave advice on what can be done to make workplaces more inclusive. It was one of the best talks I heard all year.

After much discussion, both philosophical and tactical, an audience member expressed concern about counter-discrimination. Would the time come when he would be overlooked for a job because he was not a diversity candidate?

This is not the first time this has been brought up in diversity discussions, and he was expressing what many (perhaps too many) straight white males think when diversity is discussed. To the credit of Gerry Valentine, one of the panelists, he did not chastise the audience member, and instead commended him for his bravery. The man who asked the question gave voice to a common concern that is often thought, but rarely brought up. The panelists at NewCo Boulder handled it very well, pointing out that no one wants a job just based on their gender, skin color, sexual preference, or anything other than their ability to execute on the job. And, collectively, we want to create a world where everyone has the opportunity to compete for jobs on equal ground.

I was truly moved by the entire session, but found myself upset that even at the close of 2015 we are still answering questions about counter-discrimination. When Gerry commended the question for its bravery, I first wondered if he was being glib. But knowing Gerry, I was certain he was serious about his comment. Upon further reflection, I realized what's interesting about this "pale and male" pushback is that it comes from a place of fear. A fear of discrimination is at the root of the question when someone asks, "As a white male, am I going to get passed over for a job because this company wants to hire for diversity?"

Following Gerry's example, it's OK to acknowledge that fear. It’s OK to point out that white men don’t want to live in a world where they are discriminated against, even subtly. While that is a valid fear, for the straight white male candidate, it is only a fear of a potential future. If they can imagine potential discrimination, can they acknowledge that the reality of our world today: anyone who isn’t a straight white male does experience this as real fear. Imagine walking into a job interview having to first overcome the things about you that you cannot control (gender, skin color, sexual orientation, physical handicap, economic background, country of origin, etc.) just to get to a level playing field with the other candidates. If you don't want this for yourself, you certainly wouldn't want it for anyone else.

In startups, we love to talk about unfair advantage, but when it comes to hiring, the only unfair advantages should be skills and experience. What the movement for inclusion and diversity is about—and what we should be striving for—is a world where we all compete equally. If it is a brave thing to express your fear publicly, it is braver still to acknowledge the reality of the situation and work to rectify it.

One of the things I love about the startup community is that once we identify a problem, we move forward to solve it in as many ways possible. The path to inclusion in the workplace doesn't have to be a pendulum that oscillates between two extremes—discrimination and counter-discrimination—before settling down in the middle. Pendulums are a relic of the industrial era. In the digital era, we can choose our target, set our standards, and move forward as a community to achieve them. As you build your startup, build inclusion in your workplace from day one.

Last week, I attended the LAUNCH Scale conference and had the pleasure of attending the VIP dinner the night before the event began. We hosted the top 10 startups from the IBM SmartCamp worldwide competition for the dinner and throughout the events. Famed Internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis joined us for the dinner and gave a quick pep talk to the teams. He mentioned that people come up to him and lament that they wished they’d gotten into the "Internet thing" earlier—and that he's been hearing this since 1999. His story reminded me of a similar personal experience.

In the fall semester of 1995, I was a junior at St. Bonaventure University, working in the computer lab. One day after helping a cute girl I had a crush on, she said to me, “You’re so good with computers, why aren’t you a computer science major?” Swelling with pride, I tried to sound impressive and intelligent as I definitively stated, “Windows 95 just came out, and pretty much everything that can be built with computers has been built.”

Yep. Windows 95. The pinnacle of software achievement.

It is easily the dumbest thing I've ever said—and perhaps up there as one of the dumbest things anyone has said. Ever.

But I hear corollaries to this fairly often, both in and outside the startup world. "There's no room for innovation there," or "You can't make money there," or "That sector is awful, don't bother." I'm guilty of a few of those statements myself—yet businesses find a way. We live in an age of unprecedented innovation. Just because one person didn't have the key to unlock it doesn't mean the door is closed.

Catch yourself before you fall into this loop of thinking. It might mean being the "Uber of X" or starting a business that's far ahead of its time. Think it's crazy to say everything that can be built has been built? I think it's just as crazy to say, "It's too late to get into ___ market."

For example, when markets grow in size, they also grow in complexity. The first mover in the space defines the market, catches the innovators and early adopters, and builds the bridge over the chasm to the early and late majority. (For more on this, read Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.) When a market begins to service the majority, the needs of many are not being met, which leaves room for new entrants to build a business that addresses the segments dissatisfied with the current offerings or needing specialized versions.

The LAUNCH Scale event showcased dozens of startups and the innovation out there in the world always amazes me. I'd recommend it to any startup that has built something great, and now needs to scale. Still haven't built something yourself? Think you missed the opportunity to build and create? In 1995, I didn't think about how things would change in five, 10, even 20 years. Now it's 2015 and the startup world has been growing faster than any sector in history.

Think everything that could be built has been built? Think again. Want to build something? Do it. Build something. What are you waiting for? Go make a difference in the world.

Fundica helps accelerate the online funding search for entrepreneurs in Canada. Once a year they take their mission offline and organize the country's only Funding Roadshow. In 2015, the SoftLayer Catalyst startup program partnered with Fundica to take the Roadshow to 11 cities across the country where they listened to over 200 entrepreneurs pitch their tech startups to panels of funders.

I recently sat down with Lana Tayara from the Funding Roadshow.

So, tell us about the purpose behind organizing the Funding Roadshow.The mission of the event is to better facilitate connections between entrepreneurs, funders from private and public sectors, and startup community leaders across Canada. The event aims to fulfill its purpose though a series of events, planned in 11 cities across Canada, by providing educational content designed to help early-stage technology based companies either start and/or grow their business. The one-day event is split into two streams throughout the course of the day. The first one allows up to 20 selected tech companies to present their business in a private room to a panel of investors, mentors, and service providers and get candid feedback to help them validate their business model. The second stream is open to all participants, comprised of all company stages, community developers, investors, and services providers, to listen to great presentations provided by industry leaders that will cover a wide range of topics designed to help them succeed with their business.

To maximize engagement in each city, the Funding Roadshow collaborates with local pro-entrepreneurship groups (accelerators, incubators, universities). In turn, this allows us to better connect our national partners with the local entrepreneurial community and its facilitators. Our national partners get the opportunity to network with each community, gain visibility nationally in the startup scene, and raise awareness about the resources they can offer to Canadian businesses.

What were your 2015 Funding Roadshow goals?The goals of the 2015 Funding Roadshow were to establish new partnerships with key players of the entrepreneurial community across Canada that would engage participants in each city to generate relevant connections, opportunities, and resources to each person present in the event.

In the 2015 Funding Roadshow, based on a follow-up survey conducted three months later, 31.6 percent of entrepreneurs were offered funding and 33.3 percent of funders funded entrepreneurs. With respect to the funding aspect of our event, our selection criteria for pitching companies were stricter, and presentation guidelines were shared with companies as to increase the quality of pitches and funding probability for 2015.

Lastly, we also offered a wider range of educational topics such as funding, growth models, legal guidance, bookkeeping, storytelling, and other resources available to help startups with their success. We would like to share the value with business owners using technology such as financial management software, online banking, cloud hosting, and secure cloud-based document storage, which can help increase efficiency and productivity within their organization.

What do you think the 2015 Funding Roadshow accomplished?The 2015 Funding Roadshow travelled through 11 cities from Halifax to Victoria. In each city, up to 20 selected technology-based companies pitched to a panel of eight funders. The initiative was put together with 59 partners, and provided over 96 educational presentations, and engaged 1,147 participants coast-to-coast. The Funding Roadshow was very proud to be able to form new partnerships with two of the most influential hubs in Canada, MaRS and Ryerson DMZ, both of which welcomed the event into their space as exclusive hosting partners in downtown Toronto.

Based on on-site feedback forms we collected from participants across Canada, we received excellent responses:

100 percent of participants who took the survey (funders, pitchers, community members, and general attendees) would participate in the next Funding Roadshow. (Based on a 19 percent participation response.)

94 percent of all participants who answered the survey were satisfied to very satisfied.

We are already in talks with returning sponsors who have reached out to express interest in the next edition of the Funding Roadshow.

Please relate some highlights from across this year's Roadshow. Any themes which emerged amongst all the pitching and networking?

Canadian VCs (venture capitalists) are investing more in early-stage companies.

There is an increase in interest from U.S. investors in mid to later stage companies.

Angel investment in technology companies has increased in comparison to previous years.

Emerging accelerators and collaboration between them.

Government funding varies significantly between provinces.

Early stage companies are still struggling with funding identification.

Overall the Funding Roadshow was a great success, and we can’t wait for 2016. SoftLayer will be there. Will you?

It’s been a couple of months since our Sydney data center opened for business, and within this short span we’ve seen a sizable uptake of SoftLayer services—both from existing and new customers in the region. We thought that it was an ideal time to meet these SoftLayer enthusiasts. So, recently SoftLayer CTO Marc Jones, Lead Developer Evangelist Phil Jackson, and a bunch of SLayers visited the city to host workshops, meetups, and a Sydney Launch Party.

Here is a quick snapshot of what went down, Down Under.

≡Developer Workshop at Tank Stream Labs

This year we took the roadshow developer workshops to Australia to celebrate the launch of the Sydney data center (the first round of developer workshops debuted late last year in Asia; read more: Cloud Conversations Ruled at the SoftLayer Asia Roadshow). Led by Phil, the workshop covered managing deployments using the SoftLayer Application Programming Interface (API). The workshop helped developers interact with their accounts, products, and services using direct API calls in a development environment. Phil also answered questions and helped attendees understand, solve, and implement specific ideas in their SoftLayer environments.

≡Sydney Launch Party at the Hotel CBD Fourth Floor

SoftLayer users and enthusiasts came together to join us for an evening of great conversations and excellent music. Marc discussed why SoftLayer selected Sydney for its next data center as well as gave some insight to SoftLayer products and expansion. We spent the evening chatting with our customers and key guys in the startup space.

We’d like to give a shout out to Greg Furlong, CEO & Founder of ChannelPace, David Holmes, CDO of Hostworks, and Jessica Sullivan, Marketing and Business Development Consultant and Founder sbFlourish for taking the time to chat with us. Also, thanks to all those who participated in the workshop and attended the launch party.

I am looking forward to being back in the city with all its amazing restaurants and delicacies, but mostly because it would be amazing to check back with our clients and hear more stories on how SoftLayer services are being used.

Today my grandmother turns 95. She's in amazing shape for someone who's nearly a century old. She drives herself around, does her own grocery shopping, and still goes to the beauty parlor every other week to get her hair set.

Growing up less than a mile from her and my granddad, we spent a lot of time with them over the years. Of all of the support, comfort, and wisdom they imparted to me over that time, one piece of advice from my grandmother has stood the test of time. No matter where I was in the world, or what I was doing, it has been relevant and helpful. That advice is:

You never know ‘til you ask.

Simple and powerful, it has guided me throughout my life. Here are some ways you can put this to work for you.

Ask for the Introduction

Whether you're fundraising, hiring, selling, or just looking for feedback, you need to expand your network to reach the right people. The best way to do this is through strategic introductions. In the Catalyst program, making connections is part of our offering to companies. Introductions are such a regular part of my work in the startup community. In my experience, people want to help other people, so as long as you're not taking advantage of it, ask for introductions. You're likely to get a nice warm introduction, which can lead to a meeting.

Ask for the Meeting

Now that you have that introduction, ask for a meeting with a purpose in mind. Even if you don't have an introduction, many people in the startup world are approachable with a cold email.

Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist for Apple, and author of 13 books including The Art of the Start 2.0, wrote a fantastic post, "The Effective Emailer," on how to craft that all-important message with your ask.

Another great take on the email ask is from venture capitalist Brad Feld, "If You Want a Response, Ask Specific Questions." This post offers advice on how not to approach someone. The title of the post says it all, if you want a response, ask a specific question.

Ask for the Sale

Many startup founders don't have sales experience and so often miss this incredibly simple, yet incredibly important part of sales: asking for the sale. Even in mass-market B2C businesses, you'll be surprised how easy and effective it is to ask people to sign up. Your first sales will be high-touch and likely require a big time investment from your team. But all of that work will go to waste if you don't say, "Will you sign up to be our customer?" And if the answer is a no, then ask, "What are the next steps for working with you?"

Empower Yourself

It's empowering to ask for something that you want. This is the heart of my grandmother's advice. She is and has always been an empowered woman. I believe a big part of that came from not being afraid to ask for what she wanted. As long as you're polite and respectful in your approach, step up and ask.

The opposite of this is to meekly watch the world go by. If you do not ask, it will sweep you away on other people's directions. This is the path to failure as an entrepreneur.

The way to empower yourself in this world starts with asking for what you want. Whether it's something as simple as asking for a special order at a restaurant or as big as asking for an investment, make that ask. After all, you'll never know unless you ask.

In the world of big finance, before a company IPOs, the CEO along with an investment banker(s) go on a global roadshow to pitch their business to potential investors, including hedge funds, major investment funds, and other portfolio managers. The purpose is simple: Drum up sales of the forthcoming stock issue. In the startup world, there are no big investment banks scheduling meetings. However, there are opportunities to do a roadshow for your startup, which is even more important than the IPO.

There were 275 IPOs in 2014, the largest number since 2000. By contrast, there are around 500,000 new businesses founded in the U.S. each year (not all of which are tech startups), approximately 225,000 angel investors in the U.S., and as of a year ago, there were 874 venture capital firms [read more]. In big finance, a few companies compete for the attention of a small, accessible group of investors. In the startup world, a large number of companies must seek capital from a huge pool of often-hard-to-find, geographically dispersed investors. Because of this, a roadshow is even more important for startups than it is for IPOs.

The SoftLayer Catalyst team works with startups in communities as big as San Francisco’s Silicon Valley to as small as Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The number one thing entrepreneurs outside of the major financing hubs ask about is how to access capital. My response is always the same: Your job isn't to bring more capital to your local community; it's to build a great company. You know where the capital is, so build something worth investing in, and then do a roadshow.

Practice Locally

Thankfully, as the startup world grows & matures, the number of outlets for pitching increases every month. There are opportunities in most cities to stand up and pitch your idea to your peers or investors. Start by getting out in front of your local community as often as possible. In the Boulder/Denver community, there are a few companies that I see pitch all the time, and those companies have fantastic pitches because they are constantly practicing, getting feedback, and refining.

Look for meetups that focus on pitching such as 1 Million Cups and House of Genius, or simply do a search for startup pitch meetup in your city. During startup weeks or similar events, search and sign up for pitch practices and competitions. If your co-working space is like SoftLayer partner Galvanize, they might have a big member pitch competition or a peer-to-peer practice event. Participate in as many local and regional pitch competitions as you can find. As long as the competitions don't take a piece of equity or require a significant payment to participate—either of which should be very carefully evaluated beforehand—sign up, and compete. This constant exposure to your local market will help spread the word about your company, provide feedback on your pitch, and maybe even score some prizes!

Maximizing Your Startup Roadshow

Now that you've refined your pitch and practiced in front of as many local audiences as possible, it's time to start planning your roadshow. Traveling on a limited budget means you must plan a highly focused trip with a specific goal in mind. Maybe you're traveling from New York City to Philadelphia for a competition, or from Portland to San Francisco for an investor meeting; no matter the reason, it's imperative to maximize your trip. A good roadshow involves getting the absolute most out of your travel budget, and this means booking meetings with potential investors or customers.

For example, while attending StartSLC, I visited with a friend from Colorado, Ryan Angilly from Ramen. Angilly traveled to Salt Lake City to participate in the pitch competition, but he made the most out of his trip by filling his calendar with investor meetings throughout the week. Before his trip, he reached out to his contacts in the startup community in Utah and asked for introductions. After following through with the contacts, he met with investors he would have otherwise never met.

Start by either allocating a budget for travel or identifying the most important pitch competitions in your region or industry. Once you have your trip scheduled, immediately start looking for connections within your network. It's far more effective to say, "I'll be in town the 12th to the 14th; what does your schedule look like?" than a non-specific request such as, “When are you available?” Look for connections with ties to your local community as they are more likely to be helpful and make intros on your behalf. And ask around locally about who has ties to your destination. Get your meetings lined up, and get ready for a whirlwind of pitches on your first ever startup roadshow.

I'll leave you with this final point: In 2014, venture capital firms raised nearly $33 billion, a 62 percent increase over 2013 levels. They'll spend the next few years investing that money in startups. The money is out there, and you need to do a roadshow to find it.

A key driver behind any startup looking to score funding from these big boys is the ability to handle unpredictable growth and achieve scale rapidly. Over the next few months, we’ll take a look at how we are helping our startup customers grow, scale, and succeed in Asia.

Drawing Board Events
It is hard and stressful planning a party for someone else’s big day. Birthday parties, wedding showers, and retirement parties take a lot of planning and attention to detail. The corporate world has its own set of events and challenges. That's why when I met Terence Woo at one of the startup meet-ups recently, his new venture, Drawing Board Events, made me sit up and say, “Now, that's what I need.”

After sifting online through vendor after vendor for his own wedding and calling each individually, Terence had a brilliant idea. Two years later, alongside co-founder, Samuel Stacey, he created a one-stop shop where users can browse user-reviewed vendors by categories: venues, décor, flowers, photography, cakes, and so on. After completing a quick five-minute event detail eform, users can simply click on “request quote” from as many vendors as they like. Vendors receive the request, and then quotes are emailed back—saving users the hours spent calling different vendors and providing the details over and over again.

According to Terence, right from the onset, Drawing Board Events decided to go the way of the cloud. There was no question that to achieve scale they needed a strong, reliable and flexible infrastructure. I asked him to give me three reasons why cloud is working for them, and here is what he shared:

A highly competitive industry needs a quick turnaround time.
Provisioning of events services is a highly competitive, though traditionally slow to innovate, market. Focusing on a collection of sub-industries (photography, décor, flowers, and so forth) as opposed to a single vertical market, requires housing the latest information in one location. By giving the service provider ownership over its own profile, the company is incentivized to keep its data up-to-date. Additionally, ensuring that the users are able to access updated information in real time requires a highly reliable platform.

A growing database depends on a growing IT infrastructure.
Data storage is infrastructure-hungry; there are no two ways about that. And as a business grows, so does its data. In order for Drawing Board Events to collect information on all event sub-industries, vast databases need to be housed and maintained. These databases can be stored, computed, and managed easily via the cloud. Sometimes the computing and storage needs fluctuate, and because the cloud is scalable, Drawing Board Events can add or subtract storage when and where it is required. The company needs powerful servers to handle its database workloads, as well as a cloud environment flexible enough to scale with its business.

The Catalyst Startup Program got them what they needed.
Drawing Board Events joined Catalyst after their business idea formalized and was structured. With SoftLayer, they were able to quickly host the website and access storage solutions best suited for their growing business. As a member of the program, they now have access to SoftLayer’s complete portfolio of services and can hop on SoftLayer's global network backbone.

Although currently in the pilot stage, the startup has a huge list of subscribers who are finding the website an exciting and helpful way to plan events. Moving forward, Terence is hoping to add a real-time booking system for users ready to make buying decisions, as well as develop a more robust, proprietary communications dashboard for users and vendors. He also hinted at some exciting upcoming innovations that will need a heavy tech foundation and greater dependency on the cloud.

Even though I couldn't pry all the details from him, I am already sold and can see myself as the official party planner for my family—that is, of course, with the help of Drawing Board Events. The best thing is that I’ll have over 14 categories to choose from and more than 250 service providers at my fingertips. Planning a party just got easier. Just imagine if I had to contact all those vendors—now that ain't no party my friend!

Dallas came into existence prior to the country of Texas being admitted into the United States. From its early origins, Dallas prided itself on being on the cutting edge of business.

When the railroads began crisscrossing the country to take people north and south and east and west, Dallas quickly positioned itself as the center of activity—no railroad company could pass that up.

Over the next one hundred years, Dallas developed markets that influenced the end destinations of goods around the country and around the world. Then, as technology began to develop, Dallas followed suit. Texas Instruments became a leader in semi-conductors, and Telecom Corridor moved communications to new levels.

As other parts of the world grew their own specialties and opportunities, Dallas, outside the spotlight of other advancements in business and technology around the world, quietly plodded along and avoided the large swings other economies endured.

As recently as 2010, the entrepreneurial scene in Dallas was quiet, and there was little direction in advancing it. That was then . . .

In the last 18 months, the Dallas startup ecosystem has seen a magnificent transformation. The cobwebs have cleared, groups have organized, and the drumbeat of expansion is resonating across the four corners of the DFW Metroplex.

From Fort Worth to McKinney and Denton to Dallas, new companies are coming to life like never before. At the heart of this is a community—a community of people and companies collaborating to develop relationships, create and hold events, provide mentoring support, and drive a forward-thinking approach to sustain and grow the ecosystem.

Dallas-based SoftLayer plays a vital role in this resurgence of the Dallas startup community. Beyond monetary support of events, the Catalyst program is a revolutionary force across all startup communities around the world with a unique blend of services, programs, and one-on-one mentoring. SoftLayer has committed to the growth of the Dallas startup community by investing in community leaders, plugging into local programs, providing free services, and developing relationships that will not only grow revenue for SoftLayer over time but will tightly bond startups with the corporate world in a way that provides benefit to the overall economy.

It is important for SLayers and IBMers to get involved in what is going on in the startup ecosystem in Dallas; every week, events and sessions provide opportunities to network or learn how to build a company. Go build those relationships; either personally or professionally. These relationships build benefits extending beyond work. Learn about events via online sources like LaunchDFW or Startup Digest. If outside Dallas, other communities will have similar listings. Look for ways to get tied into incubators (The Dallas Entrepreneur Center) and accelerators (Techwildcatters, VentureSpur). The local universities and other corporate entities also hold events and courses.

The evolution of business in Dallas is unique and will continue to grow. A business friendly state that supports low taxes, low cost of living, easy access to strong technical resources, leads on capital, and the ability to get from DFW to anywhere in the U.S. (or the world for that matter) in just hours keeps the “freight train” picking up speed. It’s a destination for companies to start and grow businesses, and it is so much fun to see.

“Forget about being a futurist, become a now-ist.” With those words, Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, ends his most recent talk at TED. What thrills me the most is his encouragement to apply agile principles throughout any innovation process, and creating in the moment, building quickly and improving constantly is the story we’ve been advocating at SoftLayer for a long while.

Joi says that this new approach is possible thanks to the Internet. I actually want to take it further. Because the Internet has been around a lot longer than these agile principles, I argue that the real catalyst for the startups and technology disruptors we see nowadays was the widespread, affordable availability of cloud resources. The chance of deploying infrastructure on demand without long-term commitments, anywhere in the world, and with an option to scale it up and down on the fly decreased the cost of innovation dramatically. And fueling that innovation has always been raison d'être of SoftLayer.

Joi compares two innovation models: the before the Internet (I will go ahead and replace “Internet” with “cloud,” which I believe makes the case even stronger) and the new model. The world seemed to be much more structured before the cloud, governed by a certain set of rules and laws. When the cloud happened, it became very complex, low cost, and fast, with Newtonian rules being often defied.

Before, creating something new would cost millions of dollars. The process started with commercial minds, aka MBAs, who’d write a business plan, look for money to support it, and then hire designers and engineers to build the thing. Recently, this MBA-driven model has flipped: first designers and engineers build a thing, then they look for money from VCs or larger organizations, then they write a business plan, and then they move on to hiring MBAs.

A couple of months ago, I started to share this same observation more loudly. In the past, if an organization wanted to bring something new to the market, or just make iteration to the existing offering, it involved a lot of resources, from time, to people, to supporting infrastructure. Only a handful of ideas, after cumbersome fights with processes, budget restrictions, and people (and their egos), got to see the daylight. Change was a luxury.

Nowadays the creators are people who used to be in the shadows, mainly taking instructions from “management” and spinning the hamster wheel they were put on. Now, the “IT crowd” no longer sits in the basements of their offices. They are creating new revenue streams and becoming driving forces within their organizations, or they are rolling out their own businesses as startup founders. There is a whole new breed of technology entrepreneurs thriving on what the cloud offers.

Coming back to the TED talk, Joi brings great examples proving that this new designers/engineers-driven model has pushed innovation to the edges and beyond not only in software development, but also in manufacturing, medicine, and other disciplines. He describes bottom-up innovation as democratic, chaotic, and hard to control, where traditional rules don’t apply anymore. He replaces the demo-or-die motto with a new one: deploy or die, stating that you have to bring something to the real world for it to really count.

He walks us through the principles behind the new way of doing things, and for each of those, without any hesitation, I can add, “and that’s exactly what the cloud enables” as an ending to each statement:

Principle 1: Pull Over Push is about pulling the resources from the network as you need them, rather than stocking them in the center and controlling everything. And that’s exactly what the cloud enables.

Principle 2: Learning Over Education means drawing conclusions and learning on the go—not from static information, but by experimenting, testing things in real life, playing around with your idea, seeing what comes out of it, and applying the lessons moving forward. And that’s exactly what the cloud enables.

Principle 3: Compass Over Maps calls out the high cost of writing a plan or mapping the whole project, as it usually turns out not to be very accurate nor useful in the unpredictable world we live in. It’s better not to plan the whole thing with all the details ahead, but to know the direction you’re headed and leave yourself the freedom of flexibility, to adjust as you go, taking into account the changes resulting from each step. And that’s exactly what the cloud enables.

I dare to say that all the above is the true power of cloud without fluff, leaving you with an easy choice when facing the deploy-or-die dilemma.

We’ve all heard nightmare stories about the health care industry. The combination of insurance companies, health care providers, government regulation, and literal “life and death” situations can make for a contentious environment. And with the outdated policies and procedures that permeate the industry, it’s a perfect opportunity for innovation.

When I met Martin Kelly of HealthXL a few months ago, I was intrigued by what he was building. He saw the need for innovation in health care, and he started looking around for the startups that were focusing on these kinds of issues. And while he encountered several groups with a health care focus, no one really took the lead to connect them all together to collaborate or strategize about how startups can really change health care. I mean REALLY change it.

Martin, a former IBMer, is super-passionate about innovation in technology for the health care industry, so he leveraged the IBM network and the relationships he built during his time at IBM to address a few simple questions:

What needs to happen in health care, through technology, to make the experience and the system better for us all?

What is the moonshot that needs to happen for true innovation to happen?

And when those different viewpoints came together, he realized the questions weren’t quite as “simple” as he expected.

Martin invited me to join the conversation for three days at the HealthXL Global Gathering in Dublin to hear what global leaders in the industry are saying about health care. And boy … was I surprised.

To their credit, these leaders (and their respective companies) are very willing and capable to innovate. They feel the pain of heavy administrative responsibilities, often involving duplication and triplication of work. They know how hard it is to track patients from different systems as they change jobs, insurance companies, and providers. They struggle with not being able to communicate effectively with insurance providers. And they fully understand how over-commoditized health care has become as well as its decentralization of focus from patients.

The bottom line: They feel the pain of not having the right technology to run more efficient, cost-effective, and patient-centered health care businesses. They’ve seen the finance industry integrate technology over the past few years, but they're somewhat unsure of what that could look like for them. This can only mean that there are huge opportunities for startups and innovative technologies.

I couldn’t help but consider of how nicely these conversations fit in with the Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator powered by our friends at TechStars that @andy_mui and I visited in March. The conversations inside that accelerator are the missing pieces to the conversations that companies like the Cleveland Clinic and Johnson & Johnson were having. Those enterprises have the opportunity to invest in early stage entrepreneurs and born-on-the-Web startups to incubate technologies and solutions that would prove in time to make their businesses more profitable and efficient.

But the biggest opportunity is what that means for patients.

The most telling story to play out over the next 10 years will be whether the largest health care providers and other businesses will approach these market opportunities in pursuit of cultivating a health care system that prioritizes patients. After hearing the conversation at the HealthXL accelerator global summit, that’s the ultimate challenge.

The startup ecosystem is full of entrepreneurs and teams that can deliver on the goal of improving health care while secondarily (and in some cases indirectly) improving the way heath care businesses run. These efficiencies will result in MORE clients, customers, partners, and profitability in the end, but they may require some hefty changes at the outset. Will the industry allow itself to admit what it doesn’t know?

I am excited to see where this goes. In a few years, I think we’re going to consider Martin Kelly as a key builder of this movement, and more and more businesses will be turning to him for answers to the most important of all questions: “How do we do this?”

We’re excited to be able to support Martin and all of the health care startups in the marketplace today. What will the future of health care look like when these innovators and entrepreneurs are done with it?